Kanban: these cards are stacked in your favor

November 7, 2016

Introducing the Airtable kanban view.

Since Taiichi Ohno began testing the kanban system in a Toyota machine shop in the early 1950s, its simple, visual way of optimizing production has been applied to the full range of different industries, with information workers around the world using kanban principles to manage marketing, customer service, product development, recruiting, and more.

Here at Airtable, we’re fans of the simplicity and flexibility of Ohno’s approach — so we decided to make a kanban view.

With the Airtable kanban view, you can visualize your workflow in a board of stacked cards. Click and drag to move cards between different stacks, or reorder them within a stack. You can even reorder the stacks themselves, or create a new stack directly from your kanban view.

The same powerful filtering and sorting available for Airtable grid views can be applied to stacks of cards in a kanban view.

You can also create multiple kanban views that each stack your cards on a different field — for instance, one using “Status,” and another for “Priority” — and you can customize which fields display on the cards in each view.